Wedlocked: Tangled Webs Trap Cambodian 'Brides' in China

Vietnamese villager Hoang Hong Tham, 23, watches TV in the border town of Mong Cai, 327 km northeast of the capital, Hanoi, on June 3, 2004.Tham is one of many women who fell victim to trafficking after being sold by a Chinese woman trafficker to a Chinese farmer in 1999 before her family paid for her release. / Reuters

The last she’d heard from her teenage daughter was a voice message on Feb. 10. “Mom, they don’t give me a penny. They just keep me in the house. Maybe things will change when I give them a baby,” she said.

Sitting stonefaced in her one-room shack in rural Cambodia, the mother of three recalled how her first-born was trapped in China.

“She escaped once and the brokers almost beat her to death,” En said. “If she dares to run again, there are no guarantees.”

The 16-year-old is one of thousands of Cambodians fallen prey to criminal matchmakers who scour the poorest pockets of Southeast Asia for young brides to send to China.

Some 40 million men in China will need to look abroad for a wife by 2020, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences think tank — the legacy of Beijing’s one-child policy, which has seen families abort female fetuses for decades.

Hundreds of thousands of women from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar have gone to China to wed, activists say. Some end up happily married; others speak of violence and forced labor.

With few employment avenues for young women and ballooning debt levels, rural Cambodian families make soft targets for brokers who ensnare the relatives of potential brides in their schemes, blurring the lines between victims and accomplices.

The matchmakers are near impossible to track down, police say, hiding behind nicknames and throwaway “burner” phones while employing a network of local elders to coax young women out of the village by offering huge sums of cash to their families.

In En’s case, it was a neighbor — and distant relative — who paved the way to China.

She received $2,100 in cash, and promises that her daughter would find love, work and wealth in China to funnel back to debtors threatening to repossess her house and land.

But it was all a ruse. The girl was sold, then held as a sex slave and servant by a man she had never met.

“Day and night, he demands sex from her,” En said.

“I cannot live in peace. The one who sent her lives freely in this village but my daughter is lost in China.”

Bounties

Thol Meng has been working to stop human trafficking for 16 years, now as deputy chief of a specialized police bureau in Kampong Cham Province, one of the nation’s hardest-hit regions.

He has seen waves of Cambodians being tricked, from men sold on to Thai fishing boats to women held as domestic slaves in Malaysia. But “brides to China” is the biggest concern, he said.

“A few years ago, it was about $500 for one girl,” he said. “Now families can get up to $3,000.”

Prices have skyrocketed along with rising awareness of the dangers and penalties for human trafficking.

But in a country where the average annual income is $1,200, the bounties on offer prove hard to turn down.